'The Words' review: there are words for this mishmash, just not nice ones

Several words are suggested by “The Words,” and none of them are, you reckon, the ones its makers had in mind.

Let’s start with ‘nitwit.’

“The Words” is a nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

There’s also ‘phony.’ Everything about “The Words” feels phony: the depiction of the writing life; the story of the ‘real’ novelist (that is, the one in the outermost circle) being preyed upon by a journalist; the working and private lives of the novelist in the ‘real’ fellow’s novel; the tale of love and loss in wartime at the innermost core of this utterly unengaging not-really-a-puzzle.

For the record, Dennis Quaid is epically miscast as the ‘real’ novelist, a miscue you almost don’t notice because Bradley Cooper, whom it is hard to imagine reading anything more challenging than a Ziggy cartoon, is playing the purloining novelist in his creation. Jeremy Irons appears, crusty and lovelorn, as the wronged author at the core of it all, and he’s the only one of the three who seems remotely capable of having composed a sentence, which I suppose adds to the theme of how cruel fate and publishing are, but not in a way the writer-directors of the film intended, surely.

Oh, and one more word comes to mind: ‘kidding,’ as in, ‘you’ve got to be....’ The writer-directors of “The Words” are, you see, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, whose sole previous behind-the-camera screen credit came as the co-writers of...“TRON: Legacy.”